Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Exploring RootsMagic 6 - Post 2: Online Publishing

Bruce Buzbee and Michael Booth presented a "What's New in RootsMagic 6" webinar last night that highlighted most of the new features of RootsMagic 6.  I encourage you to watch it.  I listed the new features in Exploring RootsMagic 6 - Post 1 yesterday, and looked closely at the Enhanced Timeline View.

The newest and most interesting feature of RootsMagic 6 is the "Online Publishing" feature.  The RootsMagic site says this about it:

Publish Online -- Publish your family information to My.RootsMagic.com; Dynamic sites with pedigree, family and individual views for each person; Can include notes, sources, and media for each person

I succeeded in creating a website for my genealogy and family history using RootsMagic 6, and published it on the http://my.rootsmagic.com/rjseaver site.  You can go look at it.

Here is the process I used in RootsMagic 6:

1)  In any View, click on the "Internet" menu item and select "Publish online:"



2)  The "Publish Online" window opens, and you have to be registered for a My.RootsMagic.com website - if you need to register, then click on the "Manage My RootsMagic.com account link and register.  When you have an account, then click on the "Publish my information online" link:


3)  The first step is to design the home page for your site.  Put in Title for the home page, an Introduction (if you want), add a picture for your site if you wish, and added my contact information.  Here is the Home Page I came up with:


4)  I clicked on the "Next" button and the next screen wanted me to select the information that I wanted to include.  I selected no Notes, but Sources and Photos, and did not hide living people.  I added Genea-Musings as a link on my home page:



5)  When I clicked the "Generate site" button, I had to select the people to include.  I selected myself, marked it, clicked on "Mark group" and selected "Ancestors of highlighted person," all of my ancestral families (but not collateral lines) for 13 generations (not shown):


6)  I am now ready to publish my research to the My.RootsMagic.com website.  The screen below permits me to review the site in my browser, or publish the site:


6)  After clicking on the "Publish this site to My.RootsMagic.com" link on the screen above, I was asked to log into my RootsMagic account:



The web page elements are created (two progress bars are not shown, one for "Names," and one for Persons").

7)  Finally, I can click on the "Publish" button on the screen below...but a "Ready to Publish" screen appears with a link to the terms and conditions for using the My.RootsMagic.com site.  I did read them...


8)  And the website was uploaded.  



I clicked "Finished" and went back to my RootsMagic database to add more content, sources and media.

My web site files took several minutes to upload to the My.RootsMagic.com site.  When I look at my file folder with the files, I see that over 9,500 files were uploaded and the overall size is 23.3 mb.  The RootsMagic 6 webinar said that the limit was 50 mb.

I cannot edit or modify the web site pages - I can only replace them.  I tried to create more than one family tree using different file names and selected persons, but the second one replaced the first one.  Consequently, I replaced the second file with the file uploaded for this blog post.

I will highlight the website in the next post in this series.  You can get a sneak peak at Randy Seaver's Genealogy and Family History (13 Generations) at: http://my.rootsmagic.com/rjseaver  Enjoy!  Isn't it pretty?



The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/11/exploring-rootsmagic-6-post-2-online.html

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great Job!
Very impressive. I hope to create something half as complete as yours for my ancestors.

Anonymous said...

I think I followed all the steps in creating my family website and I do have it on the my.RootsMagic.com and almost everything seems great. The exception I have is photos. I selected only primary photos as I got a message that the file was too big for all photos but none show up except the opening page. Additionally, the photo I have for the opening page is quite grainy. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks,
John

Anonymous said...

Well I may have discovered the answer to the first problem, primary photos not showing. It appears somewhere in the upgrade cycle all my previous photos designated as primary lost that indicator. I'll see what happens when I post a new tree with some photos reset to Primary.

John

Anonymous said...

Well, spoke too soon. After going in and setting a half done people with photos identified a "primary" I reloaded the tree and still no photos showing. Any ideas appreciated.

John

Randy Seaver said...

John, I have no idea why you can't see your primary photos. I suggest that you contact RootsMagic on their user forum (http://forums.rootsmagic.com/) or Help pages and see if someone can help you.